Companies, educators, government agencies and other organizations frequently want to track statistics about usage of computing resources. Some of these computing resources are physical entities (e.g., people, computers, etc.), some are logical entities (e.g., categories, documents, e-mail conversations, etc.) and some are synthetic computed relationship derived by summarizing other relationships as a class and computing a relationship.
In many existing systems it is difficult to determine relationships and affinities between such diverse data sources, therefore, the resources are often not exploited. In addition, it can be costly and time consuming to analyze the amount of data generated in a knowledge management system.
Another drawback of existing systems is that they do not provide for evolution of determined relationships and affinities over time. Once a relationship or affinity is reported, there often exists no way to ensure that the relationship has not changed or become stale. Other drawbacks also exist.